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The Strange Case of Edward Gorey by Alexander Theroux is a 166 page book filled with notes, comments and stories about the oddball illustrator. The book isn’t interested in mapping our a straight narrative – most biographies are, but Theroux is satisfied with filling his pages with piles of oddities. No need for “Edward Gorey was born in …” jumps right into the good stuff. Here are a few of my favorite tidbits, along with images taken from the Gorey household after his passing in 2000.

1 – He bought a satellite dish for his roof to get hundreds of channels on his television set. “I’m a gadabout. I love having The X-Files on tape and stuff. The Golden Girls may have fallen off a bit, but they’re still marvelous. I tend to think that television movies tend to be better than regular movies.”

2 – Gorey never married. “I have never been emotionally involved with anyone.”

3 – “My favorite thriller of all time is The Lady Vanishes,” Gorey once pronounced with finality. He agreed with me that Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Diabolique was the most “terrifying movie of all time,” and he insisted that every director plagiarized from it.

4 – He liked the way Humphrey Bogart said “Thursby” in The Big Sleep.

5 – He was fond of Ian Fleming and the Bond books long before they became popular in the United States, and I believed joined in the peculiar if harmless habit Bond fanatics have in always sending cards to each other signed 007.

6 – He confessed to talking, during performances of Swan Lake, “little naps where the corps de ballet is thrashing through it and rushing about.” He once told me that he had seen 150 Nutcrackers, claiming that although he loathed that Christmas ballet, he had “just got in the habit.”

7 – I Wanted to publish everything under a pseudonym from the very beginning,” Gorey told interviewer Robert Dahlin, “but everyone said, What for? And I couldn’t really explain why I wanted to. I still don’t know exactly, except that I think what you publish and what you are are two different things. I really don’t see that much connection.”

8 – Gorey’s stepmother from 1936 to 1952 was, curiously enough, Corinna Mura – the exotic looking guitar player cabaret-singer called Andrea who may be remembered for her vivid rendition of “La Marseillaise” in the classic movie, Casablanca in 1942.

9 – I would have loved to have read one particular play that he wrote after college for the Poet’s Theater in 1952, part of an evening’s entertainment that quite prefigured his later work. It was called The Teddy Bear: a sinister play, and in it a stuffed Teddy bear strangles infants while their fat dopey parents gamble and play cards.

10 – The secret code to reach Gorey – one that he gave out to certain friends – was to call him, let it ring once, hang up, then call back. And he would almost always answer.